Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)


The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Novel by Jean Genet, written while he was in prison for burglary and published in 1944 in French as Notre-Dame des fleurs. The novel and the author were championed by many contemporary writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, who helped engineer a pardon for Genet. A wildly imaginative fantasy of the Parisian underworld, the novel tells the story of Divine, a male prostitute who consorts with thieves, pimps, murderers, and other criminals and who has many sexual adventures. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, the novel affirms a new moral order, one in which criminals are saints, evil is glorified, and conventional taboos are freely violated.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

'Our Lady of the Flowers', which is often considered to be Genet's masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. the exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity.

FROM THE CRITICS

NY Times Book Review

Elegiac elegance, alternately muted, languorous, vituperative, tender, glamorous, bitchy, lush, mockingly feminine, "high camp," overripe, vigorous, rigorous, exalted....A remarkable, sensitive achievement.

Boston Herald

Incredible, appalling, thrilling, disturbing, offbeat, eloquent, violently crude, yet compelling. Reflects, as no other book of our time, the lower depths of human existence.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Genet has taken a tabooed subject and created a world that is out of this world. He is a magician, an enchanter of the first order. — Richard Wright

A matchless contemporary classic....Like Ulysses in its own day, so creatively formidable that any comment on its merit becomes at once presumptuous. — Terry Southern